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Pantelion Films

The success of Tyler Perry’s films have shown Hollywood that there is an audience out there that is eager to see movies made by and for African-Americans. The U.S. Hispanic market had gone untapped until recently, when Televisa, the Mexican media giant, and Lionsgate, the independent Hollywood studio, joined forces to create Pantelion Films, which aims to make movies for Latinos in the U.S.

Pantelion recently released its first film, “From Prada to Nada”, focusing on two upper class Latina sisters forced to live with relatives on a “bad side” of town when their fortunes are reversed. A Pantelion executive noted the reasons why targeting U.S. Hispanics in English is a smarter idea than filming in Spanish: “When a movie is in Spanish, if a Puerto Rican is speaking Spanish, or a Mexican is speaking Spanish, it identifies them,” Pantelion’s chief executive, Paul Presburger, says of the language’s countless dialects and geographically diverse slang. “Whereas when we do a film with Latino stars in English, it unifies.”

Pantelion is also trying to walk the line between targeting a specific ethnic group without relying too heavily on well-worn stereotypes (the boxer, the drug dealer, the ‘Latin lover’). It will be interesting to see how Pantelion fares in creating movies for the fast-growing Hispanic demographic.

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